The Commedia: language, style and metrical structure

The language of the Commedia displays a prodigious variety of styles, an effective and almost inevitable indication of Dante’s openness towards all expressions of reality, from the abyss of despair to feeling overwhelmed as in Paradise. He uses a vast array of expressive registers throughout, and although each cantica may well have a prevailing tone, running through the entire poem is an extraordinary stylistic variability. One comes across examples of formal and literary language in Inferno as well as instances of a comic-realist style in Paradiso.

The absence of a manuscript in Dante’s own hand make it impossible possible to arrive at a definitive description of the Commedia’s phonic and morphological aspects. Nonetheless, it is possible to identify its language as the Florentine tongue of the time, exploited in all its variations and imbued with influences from Latin, Sicilian and French. Dante’s range of vocabulary is astonishing, a linguistic torrent that exploits all available resources, including extreme comic elements, classical and biblical Latin, dialectal forms for imitative and expressive purposes, and scientific terminology, often to emphasize realism. Moreover, he frequently creates compounds (such as intrearsi, intuarsi, immillarsi, etc.), and includes other languages (consider the numerous lines in Latin and the eight lines in Provençal by Arnaut Daniel), even incomprehensible languages (such as the famous Papé Satan, Papé Satan aleppe in Inf., VII 1).

Dante also experiments with metrical forms, including the symbolically significant invention of the terzina, whose open-ended rhyming pattern ABA, BCB, CDC, etc., carries the narrative forward. The rhyming words themselves, often with strong expressive and structural significance, are equally remarkable, as is the extraordinary variety within the hendecasyllable forms used.